“This book will cast its spell as soon as you start reading. It has something for everyone. I raced through it once, and then settled down for a reread. River Mother gets my vote. I would recommend it to anyone. The danger, treachery, and surprise in this story keep us moving right along with River Mother as she narrates her story. Her fears and loves and friendships are at the front of the action, and there is no lack of character in those that surround her.”

Scylla Liscombe, Poet, Dancer, Artist

“I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in prehistory. Correctly read, the book (in the tradition of Castaneda) will alter how you perceive reality. I devoured the book in two days. A prize-winning poet, Spring (writing out of a small apartment in Cozumel, Mexico) takes you on a mythical journey you will never forget. ”

The original 2011 memoir of my translation of the pidgin poetry of aborigine Eldred Van-Ooy.

These translations have a peculiar magic all their own. You can feel that magic if you read the pidgin silently with one eye and the English out loud with the other. Pretend you're wearing 3-D glasses and that I've brought you into a particularly enticing garden and left you there for a few moments, alone, wondering, looking up at the leaves.

This is the 2016 expanded, revised version of my 2011 memoir and translation of the pidgin poetry of aborigine Eldred Van-Ooy. In this revised version, I explore how Van-Ooy's work was instrumental not only in changing my view of the nature of poetry but also in unconsciously guiding me in the creation of a contemporary version of pre-literate oral poetry I call SOULSPEAK and a video version of SOULSPEAK I call Dreamstories. These are two new, revolutionary forms of poetry that I believe some part of poetry will follow in the future. Like the pidgin poems themselves, this revised version will leave you in a particularly enticing garden, alone, wondering, looking up at the leaves.

THE SPHINX: WHEN WAS IT BUILT AND WHY: Part OnePart One lays out the new artistic, weathering and cultural evidence pointing toward a preliterate (prior to 3200 BC) construction of the face and front limbs of the Sphinx. It also lays out new evidence on the artistic capabilities of preliterate hunter/gatherer tribes as well as the influence of the Mother Goddess cultures of these tribes.

Part Two adds more detail to the basic artistic, weathering and cultural evidence as well as new evidence on the immigration of Semitic tribes from the Levant and Nubian tribes from the south bringing about a new Proto-Egyptian culture that gave birth to the Sphinx around 6000 BC, and later to Dynastic Egypt, where the remainder of the body of the Sphinx was completed.

Part Three adds even more detail to the basic artistic, weathering and cultural evidence. It also takes a look at the strengths and weaknesses of other theories about the Sphinx and in particular the theory of Bauval and Hancock that the Sphinx was created in 10, 500 BC.

My theory about the Sphinx argues that there is currently enough physical, artistic, cultural and weathering evidence to strongly suggest that the face of the Sphinx is not the face of Pharaoh Khafre c. 2500 B.C., but the face of a young, female Nubian shaman/leader whose impact on the lives of the prehistoric inhabitants of the Nile delta was so great that they honored her as a living Goddess by carving a bas-relief of her face on a rocky outcropping on the Giza plateau where it was gradually transformed over the centuries into what we now know as the Great Sphinx of Giza.